swombat.com

daily articles for founders

Swombat.com is no longer actively maintained, but all the posts here are still available for your use. The original objective was to regularly summarise and comment on the best articles for founders each day, as well as occasionally post our my own thoughts and advice, so that you could read the most useful articles while focusing on building your own startup. As most of the articles in the founders library were selected to be "evergreens", I hope you still find them useful!

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Evan Henshaw-Plath, formerly lead developer at Odeo (which spawned Twitter), dug up an old email from Noah Glass to the Twitter team, which announces, among other things:

Also. We currently have 160 beta testers. We receive about 100 status updates per day. We are sending between 800-1000 SMS per day.

Evan's conclusion:

After three months of running and building twitter, we only had 160 users!

I'm not sure that's the right conclusion! My take would be, if with only 160 registered users you're getting 100 updates a day, you're sitting on a gold mine. Far from being a sign of "no traction", this is a sign of great early engagement - particularly for what was essentially a social networking site, which suffers from the typical chicken-and-egg problem, and should have been utterly useless with only 160 users.